Entrepreneurship Is Thriving on Campus And Across the Alumni Community

Message from CCAA President Kyra Tirana Barry ’87

As Columbia College Alumni Association president, I joined many other College alumni volunteers at the Columbia Alumni Leaders Weekend October 11–12. We set a record for attendance at the event and, I would argue, for engagement, creativity and passion. At CALW we learned how the University, the Columbia Alumni Association, CCAA and many other Columbia organizations around the world are responding to changes and trends in economic conditions, career choices, and alumni and student interests. One of the most interesting is a new set of programs on campus this year that is organized around entrepreneurship.

A resurgence — if not a revolution — in entrepreneurship is taking place across the nation. Entrepreneurship activity is at its highest level in 14 years, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a joint venture of Babson College and the London Schoolof Business, which began tracking such activity in 1999. In 2012, the average total, early-stage entrepreneurial rate increased to nearly 13 percent of students on college campuses nationwide, an all-time high since GEM began tracking.

This trend has had an impact on curricula, co-curricular programming and student life at universities across the nation. In fact, from the Morningside campus, one need look no further than Roosevelt Island, where Cornell and Technion Universities are creating a new academic model that blends equal measures of engineering and entrepreneurship education with industry and business community engagement. Columbia is also building its own infrastructure to support this growing sector.

The undergraduate student club Columbia Organization for Rising Entrepreneurs (CORE) has grown in triple digit percentages in the last year.

“The Office of the Dean is supportive and pleased to be a part of the growing campus-wide entrepreneurship initiatives,” says Dean James J. Valentini. “We like the progress that CORE has made but we are especially proud of the contributions it is making to both the current student and alumni communities.”

In winter 2012 President Lee C. Bollinger initiated Columbia Entrepreneurship, which launched in July 2013. CE now resides in the Office of the President, maintaining a close partnership with the University’s Office of Alumni and Development. Its mission is to accelerate and encourage the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Columbia and to drive cohesion among entrepreneurship resources on campus, the student body and the alumni communities. CE is already making it easier for Columbia entrepreneurs to launch businesses.

“In partnership with the many centers of entrepreneurship excellence in and around campus, we’re building out a set of entrepreneurship programs and resources that includes co-working spaces, mentorship, workshops, lecture series and events,” says Bollinger. “It is Columbia Entrepreneurship’s goal to make it easier for young entrepreneurs to launch Columbia-born businesses.”

CE is now a cross-campus organization working with all schools, student clubs and alumni communities in a hub-and-spoke model. It already has found operational success as a convening authority forging collaboration between centers of entrepreneurship practice across campus and across the Columbia alumni community. CE also offers practical programming where much-needed resources are missing and is helping individual schools build curricula and programming.

The CCAA Board of Directors has been very supportive of this effort, brainstorming with CE leadership on alumni needs and working closely with CE staff to provide support, advice and links to the College alumni community. We are very excited to partner with CE and to make sure its activities are well integrated into our own engagement initiatives.

The strong interest in entrepreneurship in the College alumni community was clearly apparent in the enthusiastic response and attendance at an event on September 16 featuring Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Square. College students and alumni attended in huge numbers and the feedback given to CCAA and CE was that we should be doing much more.

I strongly encourage all College alumni, whether or not you are building a startup of your own, are a serial entrepreneur, are interested in supporting our students and alumni or just want to learn about the exciting new activities at Columbia, to visit entrepreneurship.columbia.edu to learn more.